As the years go by, the absentees gain a surprising prominence that we hardly perceive on a day-to-day basis. They are shadows that walk by our side through the city, they come with us to a family restaurant, they look at us from a black and white photograph, they recover their voice and their warmth in those dreams we would not want to wake up from. They are there, in disturbingly increasing numbers. They have their own entity, concrete nature, sometimes almost corporeality, as much as we feel them, even though their role is generally similar to that of the air we breathe without being conscious of doing so. Then a specific date arrives, a special event, a celebration associated in the memory with his presence, and they burst into the emotion, like elephant in china shop, mercilessly demolishing all the defensive barriers that we raise layer by layer in order to drive away the sadness caused by his absence.
Something that teaches life is that, at the moment of truth, affairs turn out to be something practically irrelevant compared to the affections that nourish the heart. Because those who do not have a heart or know their language lacks the capacity to penetrate to the bottom of any matter referred to the human being. Because I am sure that you too, friend in the distance, remember these days with singular intensity to all those people who meant something in their journey and left behind an indelible mark. They live in us. They are. Is it so. Also today, here, in this space that we got to share with many of them.
I think I have reached that stage of existence in which the calendar is no longer measured by leaves but by reams. Run the hundred meters straight. Flying. The professional goals that marked milestones have already been met or will never be met. I went inside the hill, without regrets, convinced that every moment has its music and all must dance with the same joy. There is a lot, a lot to dance. And even more to learn. What brings again to those absent who can just scratch, stay in sterile vacuum, or mutate into loyal partners with whom to move forward. I choose this second option. I miss every hug that I will not give, every smile that encloses a universe of unconditionally, every word that can instill value, every phone call, every laugh, that shoulder to cry without fear or shame. I miss you, but I would never have renounced them in the certainty of going to lose them. I deplore all the badly closed doors of the past, although the truth is that they were few because I know very well from old, by painful experience, how easy it is to be absent when you least expect it. And in any case, not a single one of them would have stopped opening. I choose to continue loving, to persist in the effort to love, from the absolute certainty that authentic love does not die.
